A little diversion away from our house building story. I had the pleasure of visiting the first Solar Decathlon competition in Washington DC back in 2002 and now I try to follow it "virtually". The winner of the 2009 competition is Team Germany from the Technische Universität Darmstadt with their surPLUShome. Incidentally, Darmstadt is the home of the Passivhaus Institut I've mentioned on this blog before.
Here is a description of the event from Wikipedia:The international and biennial event is sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Competing colleges and universities build solar powered homes and operate them on the National Mall for 3 weeks every other year.
The point of the competition is not to create new building technologies. On the contrary, entrants have to use commercially available products to demonstrate that a sun-powered home can be commercially reproduced.
Link → US Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon HomepageLink → Team Germany Homepage
Hello WorldTraveller,
ReplyDeleteI'm SO sorry that it has taken me so long to approve your comment! For reasons I don't understand, the notification email didn't reach me and as I had not logged into the Blogger site all this time, I hadn't seen it. My apologies!
Good luck with your plans! I'd love to hear more about them if you have time. But who has time? Look at my miserable example with this blog!